Palestinian Authority Traitors Serving Israel

By Stephen Lendman - Posted on 19 October 2010

Palestinian Authority Traitors Serving Israel - by Stephen Lendman

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' duplicitous treachery exposes him as an enemy, not ally, of his people. An earlier article on him quoted Jeffrey Blankfort calling him a "double agent (serving) his Israeli and US masters in plain sight." In June 2003, Edward Said called him "Israel's sheriff," saying he's "colorless, moderately corrupt, and without any clear ideas of his own, except that he wants to please the white man," his Washington and bosses. Access the article through the following link:

-- two Palestinian activists murdered "in a wide-scale military operation" against a Hebron neighborhood, including shelling residential homes lawlessly; in addition, dozens of Palestinians harassed, three apartments destroyed, four homes damaged, a store demolished, two others damaged, a car destroyed, and 12 Palestinians arrested;

-- a Silwan village Palestinian child wounded "when IOF fired at children" demonstrating peacefully against the detention of four others;

-- several nonviolent West Bank demonstrations against settlement and Separation Wall construction targeted, wounding one child and affecting dozens of civilians and human rights activists from tear gas inhalation or "sustained bruises;" in addition, three Palestinians and four human rights workers arrested;

-- four Gazans, including two children, wounded in a failed assassination attempt;

-- 27 West Bank incursions (lawless by any standard) resulted in 33 Palestinian civilian arrests, including nine children and an old man - guilty only of being Palestinians on land Israel wants to steal; and

In addition, for over 40 months, Israel has denied visitation rights to families of over 700 Gazan detainees, hardening their incarceration for them and their loved ones.

In the West Bank, complicit PA forces aid Israeli lawlessness, serving as an occupation enforcer. For weeks, its security forces have suppressed public dissent, dispersed peaceful protests, and arrested hundreds of West Bank Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters, including public figures, subjecting them to torture and other abuse, ill treatment, and humiliation. Others were publicly beaten, including civil leaders, academics, doctors, other professionals, and ordinary people struggling for their rights.

PCHR condemned what it calls PA "campaigns of arbitrary arrests," in violation of international and Palestinian law. Besides hundreds made earlier, dozens more were carried out and many others have been summoned. For many, it means arrest on sight.

Information gotten from Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) Hamas-affiliated members shows at least 230 Hebron residents detained, 130 by the Preventive Security Service (PSS), the others by the General Intelligence Service (GIS).

In Bethlehem, PSS detained 25 Palestinians, GIS 15 others. In Nablus, 77 more in Jnaid Prison. In Ramallah and al-Bireh, 45. Detainees include "released prisoners from Israeli jails and relatives of PLC members." In addition, dozens of Palestinians were arrested just days after being released. In detention, most were denied family visits and access to legal counsel.

Worse still are reports of torture and abusive treatment, released detainees saying they were "held under inappropriate, and even severe and inhuman, detention conditions," those with chronic illnesses or injuries most affected. In addition, many were tortured and subjected to other forms of abuse, at least several requiring hospitalization.

One released detainee said he "hear(d) voices of detainees crying in pain as a result of being beaten and tortured." During interrogation, he was forced to listen to get him to cooperate. He also saw prisoners beaten and subjected to prolonged shabeh, the painful position abuse with hands and legs bound tightly to a small chair, compounded by sleep deprivation.

Detainee families said arrests and homes searched were carried out provocatively, in at least one case with no one there, but on return, a father and four sons were arrested. Others in their family are also being held.

A released detainee said he and many others were taken to a Taffouh village police station and held under inhuman conditions. In addition, dozens of Islamic Jihad members and supporters were summoned, forced to supply detailed information, then sign an oath "not to violate the Palestinian law, not to oppose the PNA's public policy, and not to engage in any activity of Islamic Jihad." Others were summarily arrested, detained and tortured.

Outraged, on October 6, Hamas responded, saying it will retaliate if arrests and abuse continue. At a Gaza news conference, spokesman Abu Ubaida said:

"We say today that our silence will not last long. If (PA security forces) pursue their aggression, we will end the silence" and respond.

Hamas was angered that one of its members, Alaa Abu Dhiyab, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and that PA forces arrested hundreds of its supporters, and keep seizing more. Its leaders also oppose direct peace talks, saying holding them abandons "the national rights of the Palestinian people" because Israel demands unconditional capitulation, not justice, equity, real peace, and a viable Palestinian state. In addition, they accuse Abbas of selling out, serving Israel, not his own people.

Earlier on September 29, Islamic Jihad leader Khader Adnan Mousa was detained, his wife, Randa, saying a GIS force raided his workplace in Qabatya village near Jenin and arrested him. On October 2, she learned that he was accused of joining illegal militias, and he went on hunger strike after arrest. He was also subjected to shabeh, other abuse, and had his eyeglasses taken.

On October 3, the Al Dameer Association for Human Rights called for his immediate release, saying his arrest and others were arbitrary and political. It asked the PA to "take real and effective measures in order to stop such illegal acts and completely end political arrests" and persecution.

"Al Dameer stresses that arrests are regulated by the Palestinian law and fall under the jurisdiction of the law enforcement officers, including the civil police, who are directly supervised by the Attorney General."

By law, arrests of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members and supporters, including Mousa, are illegal acts, constituting political persecution. On October 5, PCHR joined in, calling for "the immediate release of all (PA) political detainees, including Mousa, expressing "condemnation" for them all.

According to Hamas, 1,008 party members were arrested in September alone. On October 14, a party spokesman said:

"It's clear that the arrest campaign being waged by the Palestinian Authority did not exclude anyone and did take into consideration the circumstances and titles of the people being arrested, whether they were former detainees from Israeli jails, university professors, teachers, or members of city councils and other categories."

Arab League Summit Smoke without Fire

At the October Arab League summit in Sirte, Libya, Hamas and other Palestinian factions urged further supportive action, including opposition to direct peace talks with Israel, knowing their futility. However, according to Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, not enough was done "to support the Palestinian position in confronting the occupation. The Arabs must adopt a unified strategy that backs the armed Palestinian resistance and backs the Palestinians' steadfastness of their land."

Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haneya, added more, saying, "Israeli aggressions, blockade, and the Judaization of Jerusalem require clear and crucial decisions." PFLP representatives said decisions so far taken are "not enough and (go) on in a vicious circle. The Arabs' weak position would encourage Israel to keep carrying out practices against our people and lands." Islamic Jihad leader, Khaled al-Batch, made similar comments, saying Arab states abandoned the Palestinian cause.

Concluding their meeting on October 12, the Extraordinary Arab Summit made four policy decisions for joint Arab actions, none focusing on Palestine, showing the above comments are accurate.

Vilifying Arabs for Their Faith and Ethnicity

Haaretz writer Gideon Levy's October 15 article reflects a larger issue. Titled "Time to stick it again to the Arabs," he said:

"Underneath everything is hatred - hatred and contempt for Arabs....This is what is behind the right wing's nationalist laws and its so-called (no-peace) 'peace.' " It reflects "dark and dangerous instincts," throughout Israel's leadership and Knesset members. "(A)ll of them are Arab haters, whether openly or not." Most never "met an Arab, but they know everything about them. Not one of them has even begun to think of Arabs as being equal to Jews," let alone as human beings deserving basic rights and freedoms.

Repressive force only is their language - no agenda, no vision, only "pathological....amoral" violence begetting more, reflecting hard line revisionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky's belief that peaceful coexistence was unattainable, so Jews had to build "an iron wall of (superior) Jewish military force."

Since Ben-Gurion, Israeli leaders espoused it, choosing violence over conciliation; confrontation, not diplomacy; collective punishment, not coexistence; and racial hatred over core Judaic dogma - Talmudic/Torah teachings much different from radical Zionism, what many Jews call heresy for being racist and advocating separation, military power, and brute force. Also for claiming Jewish supremacy, specialness, and uniqueness, while being extremist, undemocratic, and hateful, ideas harmful to Jews and non-Jews alike.

Levy understands, concluding his article saying "The damage the right wing is inflicting upon us will linger for many years after it leaves office." Overall, longstanding hatred is too deeply rooted. What passes for Israeli leadership leads nowhere, and "the garbage it is spreading in the meantime is piling up higher and higher." Sooner or later it'll topple, perhaps taking Israel and its PA allies with it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

Abbas is at this insanity, cowardice and treason again? He's evidently been like this for a long time now, but the above article causes me to wonder if he isn't worse now than before. He's no longer supposed to be occupying the political office he's in, PM or President; I forget which. His term ended last year, unless it was early this year. While Abbas clearly has no shame, the rest of the PA and its Palestinian supporters should feel extremely ashamed for their treachorous and cowardly conduct. They'll all deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison, if Gaza or Palestine ever gains freedom from Israeli or Israeli-U.S. oppression and genocide.

And it's also disgusting that other Arab countries are spineless and treachorous. The political leaderships of these countries are nearly as guilty as Israel is in or for its crimes against Palestinians. I think we can justly arrive at that conclusion.

Anyway, and for an example of a little Zionist Israeli clownery, I just got the link for the following article from xymphora.blogspot.com this morning and readers, here, should "get a kick" out of this news; well, news outside of the U.S. anyway. It's evidently censored in the U.S., but is sure to "entertain" readers who get to learn of this event.

Passenger experiences air rage en route to Hong Kong, threatens to kill himself and others by opening door; none injured.

Talkbacks (9)

An Israeli man had to be restrained after threatening to kill others and himself on a Qantas flight from Australia to Hong Kong on Thursday.

Qantas confirmed that the passenger "became disruptive" to the Sydney Morning Herald.

A passenger told the Australian daily that the man began to pray aloud in Hebrew and announced to the passengers: "I'm going to kill myself, you are all going to die, it will be God's will, what will be will be, I'm going to open the door."

The crew then reportedly held the man down and handcuffed him.

No one on the airplane was harmed, therefore Hong Kong Police told AFP that they would not charge him.

Hong Kong Police also said the passenger was 23 years-old and named Ariel. He is under observation at a Hong Kong hospital following feeling "emotional after complaining about the food and other services."

It reminds me a little of the group of five or six Israelis who were caught on some American corporate news media video footage across from the World Trade Center Towers when the towers were being hit on 9/11 and these clowns were clearly jubilant, celebrating this spectacle. I know they were finally tracked down by the FBI or some other American police force, but don't recall what happened after that, except that it had been confirmed that the jerks were Israelis; not American Jews, but Israelis.

Those clowns were evidently Zionists and the clown on the Quanta plane was, I believe, surely another Zionist quack. Some religious cults are extremely bad for a person's psychology and Zionism, so-called Jewish and so-called Christian Zionism, of today is hellishly corruptive.

Both stories, extremely unreported in U.S. media! Probably the only American news media, corporate anyway, to have done any reporting on the group of Israeli clowns across the river from the WTC Towers was the news media that had caught these celebrants on video; all of the others ignoring this special "treat".

I don't know if Israeli forces are really training to later or soon conduct transfers of Israeli Arabs, but they are training for Arab transfer riots, and I got the link for this article at xymphora.blogspot.com. Jonathan Cook, unless he's moved over the past few years, lives in Nazareth and investigatively reports on the Israel-Palestine "conflict", which I don't think is really a conflict, for it really is Israeli war of aggression and genocide against Palestinians; most really. I have been among people who called the situation one of conflict, but I don't think it's accurate. There'd be no conflict or tensions at all if it wasn't for Israel's genocidal crimes and if Israel had some real respect for non-Jews and Jews against Israel's crimes.

NAZARETH // Israel secretly staged a training exercise last week to test its ability to quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal that calls for the forcible transfer of many Arab citizens, the Israeli media has reported.

The drill was intended to test the readiness of the civil defence units, police, army and prison service to contain large-scale riots by Israel's Arab minority in response to such a deal.

The transfer scenario echoes a proposal by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's far-right foreign minister, for what he has called a "population exchange". Mr Lieberman proposes land swaps that would force many of Israel's 1.3 million Arab citizens into a future Palestinian state in return for annexation into Israel of most of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The scheme has been widely criticised as a violation of international law.

He outlined his proposal to the United Nations General Assembly last month. Although Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, said he was not consulted about the speech, he did not admonish Mr Lieberman. The training exercise has fuelled fears among Israel's Arab minority that the government might be hoping to pressure Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), to agree to land and population swaps as part of US-sponsored peace negotiations, which have stalled.

Dov Chenin, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the joint Jewish-Arab Communist Party, called Tuesday in a speech in the chamber for more details of the exercise from the government, although officials offered no immediate response. Mr Chenin said the drill was a sign Israel was heading in an "extremely dangerous direction". "A few years ago, only the extreme right-wing parties talked about transferring Arab citizens, but now we see that even the security forces are preparing concrete plans for carrying out such a scenario."

Mr Netanyahu demanded this week that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state before further progress was possible - a move seen by the Arab minority as a threat to its status inside Israel. A US State Department spokesman referred to recognition as "a core demand" and said it had Washington's support. Haneen Zoubi, an Arab member of parliament, said the exercise was designed to send "very clear messages" to the Arab minority and Mr Abbas' negotiators.

Damn, or as Rev. Jeremiah Wright fittingly said, (may) God damn the U.S.! The U.S. "leadership", that is.

It is h.llbent of Netanyahu to demand that Palestinians recognize the state of Israel when the Israeli "leadership" constantly refuses to recognize the state of Palestine!

"Netanyahu is letting us know that we are not part of his vision of Israel's future as a Jewish state and that, if we try to resist his plans, our protests will be greeted with violent repression," she said.

"He also wants the Palestinian negotiators to understand his minimum requirements for an agreement. He is not interested in justice for the Palestinians or in creating a viable state,” she added.

Details of the five-day drill were reported last weekend on the Voice of Israel radio station by Carmela Menashe, one of Israel’s most respected military correspondents.

The exercise envisioned extensive disturbances by Israel’s Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, as security forces prepared to enforce border changes that would forcibly relocate many to a new Palestinian state, according to her report.

In the operation, code-named Warp and Weft, the security services established a large detention centre in the Galilee region between Nazareth and Tiberias to cope with an “unprecedented” number of arrests of Arab citizens.

"In the operation, more fittingly code-named Warped and Theft, ..."!

The drill anticipated a rapid takeover of the West Bank by Hamas following the signing of the peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority. In the exercise, the security forces had to handle the firing of hundreds of rockets into Israel, terrorist attacks, prison riots and breakouts.

As Mr Chenin raised his concerns, Mr Lieberman opened a new front in his attacks on Israel’s Arab citizens, following his repeated statements questioning their loyalty to the state. While hosting the Finnish foreign minister on Tuesday, he accused groups of Arab citizens of plotting to secede from the state under orders from the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

“The Palestinians will try, through various groups among Israeli Arabs, to overturn the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state and will work to create different autonomous areas within the state,” he said.

I seriously doubt that they seriously contemplate such secession. They know very well how Israel would respond with extreme violence and I don't think the Israeli Arabs have any sort of "popular" death wish. And Lieberman is a psychopath and liar; they're two of his main characteristics.

Aluf Benn, a senior columnist for the Haaretz newspaper, wrote yesterday that Mr Netanyahu was “hiding behind” Mr Lieberman and that the prime minister was the “true instigator” of the wave of anti-Arab policies and laws the government was promoting.

On Sunday the cabinet approved a bill that would demand a loyalty oath from non-Jews seeking citizenship.

That's right. Steal a people's land and genocide them, and then demand that survivors pay your reign a loyalty oath. H.LLBENT! The gates of h.ll have been fully opened. If any of these psychopathic leaders try to open these gates any more than they already have, then the hinges are going to bust.

In the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab MP, accused Mr Netanyahu of being behind “a gradual ethnic-cleansing scheme – removing as many Arabs as possible while creating a Jewish, homogenous Israel”.

Sounds Nazi-like. Well, that's how the Israeli leadership is. I thought the Nazis were stopped with the end of WW II, but it seems that a similar but different breed existed before and since, as well as in parallel. Maybe it's the psychopathic Zionist Jews and not ordinary Eastern European Jews who drove Hitler to his insane extreme; and being insane, he would've lost sight of the fact that there were many ordinary Jews who weren't like the insane Zionist ones.

It's just a theory.

Opinion polls among Israel’s Arab minority have repeatedly shown strong opposition to any plan to revoke their citizenship or force them into a Palestinian state.

The Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s largest human-rights group, wrote to Mr Netanyahu this week calling the media reports “alarming” and demanding assurances that there were no plans for “population transfer”.

It added that the impression was being created that “an issue which is completely illegitimate – the forced revocation of the citizenship of some of the country’s Arab citizens – is perceived by the government as a reasonable and even likely possibility”.

Some observers have speculated that the police minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, who is a member of Mr Lieberman’s Yisraeli Beiteinu Party, may have been the driving force behind the exercise.

However, Mr Chenin said such an extensive drill involving so many different branches of the security forces could not have been carried out without the involvement of other government ministers, including Ehud Barak, the defence minister.

Rashid Khalidi is "the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University", and the video is by the Palestine Center.

Thank you all for coming today, and, to those of you who are watching, thank you for viewing this talk. Those of you who live in Washington, who are subjected to the American media, will probably be relieved to hear that I will not be talking about the peace process. If you insist, I'm happy to answer questions about it. I'm going to talk about a broader topic, which I think sheds light on why there is not a process that is leading towards peace. And this is the Palestine question and the American public sphere. It is a great honor to be doing this in the context of the Edward Said lecture series. Edward was a dear friend and I think that having a lecture series in his name will help to push the process that he actually personally played a very big role in opening up in this country.

A number of factors played a part in cementing support for Zionism and later for the state of Israel of its two primary international sponsors: Great Britain and the United States. As you know, each of them in its own era was the greatest power of its time. In winning over the British and American political classes and their respective publics to the cause of Zionism and to the cause of Israel, a crucial role was played by scholarly and non-academic writings, and later by the cinema and other media. I think it's insufficiently recognized that establishing the hegemony of Zionism in the field of ideas in an Anglo-American academic and public discourse was a vital precondition for its successes in the political and diplomatic arenas. The discursive victories of Zionism preceded its triumphs in the chancelleries of the world and on the battlefields, and the latter would never have occurred, in my opinion, but for the former. In other words, in addition to being successful as an idea, as a national movement, and as a colonial settler phenomenon, political Zionism has always been a resounding public relations triumph.

Now, the Zionist narrative was already almost uncontested in the United States even before 1948. My father and my mother -- both of them lived in New York in those years -- tell me stories about how difficult it was to get out an alternative narrative. That Zionist narrative has become even more firmly entrenched in the public sphere in the decades since then through extensive writings and through making major inroads into popular culture. The reason for this is not hard to understand. Historically, Zionist leaders and after them leaders of the state of Israel, with good strategic sense and with a keen eye to opportunity and with a good story to tell, understood where to focus their efforts to garner international support. And the United States was a focus of this from a very early period. This was absolutely vital, they understood, to their efforts to create a Jewish state in what was then an Arab country with an overwhelming Arab majority. Arabs owned 94 percent of the land. It was an Arab country with a large Jewish minority. Not only to create a Jewish state in an Arab country, but also to create an impregnable position for it in a hostile region. Indeed, as they knew, it would have been impossible for them to have succeeded in their endeavor without massive external assistance. Therefore, this work in the United States and Britain and elsewhere was essential.

What I am going to discuss today, mainly, is how this Zionist-Israeli narrative attained its preeminent status in this country and then I'll conclude with a relatively brief assessment of whether the power of this narrative may or may not be waning. (snip)

(snip)

(snip) The word "Palestinian" was a dirty word. You couldn't use it for several decades in polite company. The Palestinians, if they were mentioned at all, were described as murderous and irrational enemies of the Jews and as having left their homeland in 1948 at their leaders' behest, the better to enable the superior invading Arab armies to wipe out the fledgling Jewish state. These myths were central to the Zionist narrative, and they were hammered home relentlessly via every possible medium. This was done so effectively that these core Zionist myths came to be nearly universally believed in this country.

(snip)

(snip) A huge edifice of scholarship, pseudo-scholarship, and rank propaganda was devoted to obscuring the realities of the dispossession of the Palestinians and to showing that the Arabs, supposedly much stronger than the Jews in Palestine, had both the intention and the capability to strangle the infant Israeli state at birth. Much of what has appeared since then in the American public sphere repeats these unfounded assertions, which again precisely mirror the founding myths of the Israeli state. It was not until nearly four decades after 1948 that the counter-narrative by a few people put forth in the early 1950s and 1960s was thoroughly substantiated by research by the so-called Israeli 'new historians' based on newly released documents from the Israel state archives. (snip)

(snip)

These were changes that were the result of the fact that our government, the U.S. government, was increasingly coming to see Israel, for the first time, as an ally. It was seeing it for the first time as a proxy in the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and its Arab clients in the region. This was not always the case. We think it was but it wasn't. The United States and the Soviet Union were on the same side in 1947-1948; they both supported the establishment of Israel. They were on the same side in 1956; they both opposed the tripartite aggression against Egypt. There was no Cold War alignment on one side or the other on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel had not been considered to be a strategic asset to the United States, by most American policy-makers, from 1947 right up through the mid-1960s. But by 1967, the United States had become completely aligned with Israel against the Arab states, most of which were supported by the USSR, in a configuration that continued until the end of the Cold War. Israel has been considered a strategic asset ever since -- but, I'm trying to stress, never was before that -- even though there may be some questioning of Israel's strategic value in some policy-making circles in this town today.

(snip)

I disagree with the idea or phrasing about the Zionist leaders and leaders of Israel having had "good strategic sense"; it's h.llbent sense. They had and have strategic sense, no doubt about it. Thatt's very obvious. It was never good though. I'm a little "touchy" about calling evil good.

But the edited transcript for the lecture proves that this is very important, and very educational.

Mike Leigh had been due to teach classes at the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School (SSFTS) in Jerusalem next month, but has pulled out following the Israeli government’s amendment to the Citizenship Act.

Leigh had been expected to lead the ’Great Masters’ programme at the prestigious institution from November 20-27. In a letter to SSFTS director Renen Schorr, he outlined his reasons for the cancellation.

"As you know, I have always had serious misgivings about coming, but I allowed myself to be persuaded by your sincerity and your commitment," Leigh wrote. "And it is because of those special qualities of yours that I am especially sorry to have to let you down. But I have absolutely no choice. I cannot come, I do not want to come, and I am not coming."

"Eight weeks after our lunch, the Israeli attack on the flotilla took place. As I watched the world very properly condemn this atrocity, I almost cancelled. I now wish I had, and blame my cowardice for not having done so."

"Since then, your government has gone from bad to worse. I need not itemise all that has taken place ... I still had not faced up to the prospect of pulling out until a few weeks ago, but the resumption of the illegal building on the West Bank made me start to consider it seriously. And now we have the Loyalty Oath."

"This is the last straw – quite apart from the ongoing criminal blockade of Gaza, not to mention the endless shooting of innocent people there, including juveniles ..."

Mike Leigh had previously served on the Russell Tribunal of 2009, which highlighted Israeli human rights abuses. He has been a longstanding supporter of the Palestinian liberation movement.

Renen expressed that he was "greatly saddened" by Leigh’s cancellation and made efforts to distance his school from the Israeli government.

This article shows a picture and the caption reads, "Rachel Corrie lies on the ground fatally injured by the Israeli military bulldozer driver". There's no gore; blood on her face, but no gore. So surely anyone can look at this picture.

Supreme Court refuses challenge to use of screen to shield soldiers

Haifa, Israel – The driver of the bulldozer that crushed to death Rachel Corrie in Rafah, Gaza, in March 2003, and the military commander in charge of the unit on the ground that day, are scheduled to testify on Thursday, October 21 in the civil lawsuit filed by Rachel’s family against the state of Israel for her unlawful killing.

Earlier this month, the court granted the State of Israel’s request that soldiers involved in the incident be permitted to testify behind a screen to protect their identity. Lawyers for the Corrie family appealed the decision to the Israeli Supreme Court, requesting that at a minimum the family be allowed to view the soldiers, but the court refused to hear the challenge.

Consequently, the bulldozer driver will testify behind a screen. However, because the unit commander on the ground that day, Captain R.S., gave an interview that was broadcast on Israeli television in 2003, and was thus already known to the public, the presiding judge ruled that he will testify in plain view. Although disclosed during the TV broadcast, his name still remains redacted in official court records.

A third witness scheduled, known only as S.L., was driving the second bulldozer in the unit near Palestinian homes in Rafah. He will also testify from behind a screen.

The court was to hold hearings in the case on October 17-18, but postponed due to a death in Judge Gershon’s family. Therefore, additional court dates are anticipated to be added to the court calendar.

The October 21 hearing will take place between the hours of 9:00-16:00 before Judge Oded Gershon at the Haifa, District Court, 12 Palyam St., Haifa, Israel.

I don't see why the two IDF soldiers should be hidden behind a screen. Since they accept to brutally kill people, they can certainly be non-hidden during a hearing like this one. And their names should be disclosed.

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